The invention relates in general to communication systems and in particular to wireless communication systems that can communicate audio,.video and data signals.
The field of wireless telecommunications has grown rapidly in recent years, and the demand for wireless telecommunication services and equipment continues to grow. This notable growth is due, in part, to the proliferation of new communication standards and the development of new hardware technologies. For example, the successful adoption of cellular telecommunication standards has promoted the growth of the cellular telephone industry and driven the development of smaller and more power efficient cellular telephones that incorporate new hardware technologies that provide for greater conversion rates between the analog and digital domain, and greater digital signal processing power.
Although the new these new standards and hardware technologies have provided a slew of new devices that often work exceptionally well, these devices are generally dedicated to a specific application and are based on application specific hardware designs are almost always restricted in the functionality they can provide. Specifically, the new hardware devices generally employ application specific hardware architectures, including proprietary bus architectures, components, and other proprietary elements, that reduce the flexibility of these systems and make the systems difficult to upgrade, difficult to extend, and difficult to scale.
In part to address the extensibility issues that arise from the use of proprietary hardware architectures, digital radios, or software radios, have been developed. Software radios employ analog to digital converters and digital signal processors to process a broadcast band signal and generate a stream of data that is representative of the information being transmitted on a selected channel. Brannon, Brad, Wide-Dynamic-Range A/D Converters Pave the Way for Wideband Digital-Radio Receivers, EDN (Nov. 1, 1996). The datastream can then be passed to a software application that further processes the datastream to perform the application at hand. For example, a software radio application that implements an FM radio receiver can process an incoming datastream to decode the signal transmitted on a particular radio frequency assigned to a particular radio station and can play the music or voice signals that were encoded on that RF signal.
Software radios, therefore, provide greater flexibility by providing a datastream to a computer system that can employ an application program to process the datastream as the program dictates. Accordingly, by changing the software that processes the datastream, a user can upgrade, or extend, the functionality that is being implemented by the software radio. This provides greater flexibility and therefore more powerful telecommunication devices.
Moreover, software radios exist today that provide the datastream of the modulated or demodulated data into an application program that can be run on a general purpose workstation. This use of general purpose workstations more readily integrates wireless communication functions with data processing functions and more easily allows wireless communications to be integrated into other data processing systems. For example, this increased level of integration allows software radios to leverage the power of wireless communications along with the resources available on a data processing platform, such as network communications, greater data storage, and other such capabilities.
Although software radios provide increased flexibility over application specific hardware architectures, software radios still employ application specific digital hardware or digital signal processors (DSPs) for performing the signal processing that develops the datastream that represents the information encoded within a broadcast signal. Accordingly, in a software radio the signal processing happens largely within dedicated signal processing hardware, typically on a application specific platform, and little to no opportunity is provided to adapt or alter the way in which signal processing takes place to generate the datastream. For example, even in a software radio, dedicated hardware will still perform the basic signal processing that determines the width of a channel, the number of channels that can be processed at once by the software application, and other similar parameters.
Accordingly, software radios still place a boundary of an application specific hardware architecture between a user""s application software and the demodulated data available from the RF signal. This in turn limits the flexibilty of the software radio and reduces the ability to provide telecommunication functions across the data processing environment.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide wireless telecommunication devices that can adapt or alter the signal processing being carried out by the wireless communication device.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide wireless communication systems and methods that provide greater flexibility over the datastream generated by the wireless communication device.
Other objects of the invention will, in part, be obvious, and, in part, be shown from the following description of the systems and methods shown herein.
The invention provides systems and methods that include, inter alia, wireless communication systems that integrate wireless receivers and transmitters with general purpose processing platforms and that include a data access channel that delivers into the memory space of an application program digital data that is representative of a modulated signal. Accordingly, these systems can employ wide band digitization of an incoming signal, such as an RF signal, direct the digitized data into the application memory space of a general purpose processing platform and allow an application program operating on the general purpose processing platform to perform the digital signal processing that obtains the information encoded within the digitized signal.